That’s how much the world spent on influenza preparedness in 2009; about $4 billion was spent in the US alone.Two billion dollars were spent on purchase of Tamiflu (Olseltamavir).

However, there is increasing evidence that Tamiflu has more serious neuropsychiatric side effects than initially thought, and the evidence of its effectiveness appears to be overstated. There was a well-referenced review of this in the current issue of New York Review of Books.

only two of which had been published in peer-reviewed journals.Researchers associated with the Cochrane Collaboration initially published a positive review of the medicine, but have more recently been rebuffed in their efforts to obtain the primary data from those three studies.The author of the metaanalysis has ‘lost’ the data, and the pharmaceutical company which markets Tamiflu in the US has only been willing to share summary data.